About
Oleg Troyanovsky is a composer and media artist based in New York. His work finds music inside systems that were never meant to produce it: codes, alphabets, chemical data, heraldic images, names and dates.
Born in 1980, he grew up in Geneva and studied composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, graduating in 2004. His work spans orchestral and instrumental music, film and television, radio, and sound installation, and has been presented in concert halls, museums, theaters and broadcasts across Europe and the United States.
At the center of his practice is transformation. A source is translated into musical material through a precise procedure. The procedure stays in the background; what the listener hears is the change itself, a document, a table or an emblem becoming music.
Works in this line include Encrypted in Music (2015), a radio composition on musical cryptography for Radio Russia, with contributions from Sofia Gubaidulina and Tom Johnson; Periodic Table (2019), built from the atomic masses of the chemical elements for Moscow State University’s virtual reconstruction of Mendeleev’s study; Music Found in a Coat of Arms (2019), an installation derived from the Botkin family coat of arms for ROSIZO’s exhibition History of One House; Paysage intérieur (2023), structured from the composer’s own biodata, for an exhibition in Compiègne, France; and Tap Code Songs (2025), an interactive installation at Amherst College in which messages exchanged by political prisoners through the prison tap code become music that visitors can shape.
His music has been performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. His orchestral work Unknown Story was recorded at Abbey Road Studios by cellist Andreas Graf and the LSO under Ben Palmer for Hope: 12 Prayers for Cello & Orchestra (Claves Records, 2026), an album supporting Save the Children.
Troyanovsky has written music for more than 50 films and television productions, working with leading directors and major studios. His screen work ranges from popular series and feature films to art-house cinema and documentary, including Boris Yukhananov’s The Mad Angel Pinocchio (2022), the series First Number (2024) and Polden (2026), and Stasya Tolstaya’s Family Happiness (2025).
Encrypted in Music received the Grand Prix at Prix Italia in 2015. The same year, Radio Symphony: Music Observatory, presented as a debate among five fictional composers and revealed as a single symphony, received a Special Prize at Prix Europa. In 2016 he served on the Radio Music jury of the Prix Italia. In 2020 he was one of six winners, selected from more than 11,000 entries, of the HBO Westworld Scoring Competition, judged by a jury that included J. J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan. He also lectures on music and his own practice at universities in the United States, including Tufts University.
Selenus is a separate project that looks for the melodies that names make possible. Through a musical cipher, in the tradition of composers who turned names into notes, a name and a date of birth are converted into a melody, which becomes the basis of a short piano piece. It is not music about a person, but music that arises from their name.